The Lost Girls (37 page)

As disconcerting as that revelation had been (at least for the straight men involved), I didn't find it nearly as hard to witness as some of the “love connections” being made all around us. Very young girls, some of whom didn't appear much older than fifteen or sixteen, were draped around or pressed up against much older men, guys who could have been three or four times their age. For the most part, the partners in these May–December affairs looked totally in their element. The girl—or girls—flirted and giggled; the old men looked ecstatic, as if they couldn't quite believe they'd stumbled into a real live version of their pornographic fantasies.

We'd later learn that Patong is actually one of three renowned spots in Thailand (the other two being Bangkok and Pattaya) where international tourists can engage the services of prostitutes without fear that they'll be judged or arrested. Dozens, if not hundreds, of Web sites explain exactly where to hook up with a Thai “girlfriend,” how much you should expect to pay for “short-time” and “long-time” sexual services, and how to avoid being drugged or duped by a girl looking to take a
farang,
or Westerner, for all he's worth. Apparently, according to the sites, these devious young women are master manipulators who see their clients as walking ATMs. Be careful, the sites warn, because a girl will say or do just about anything to extract more cash from your wallet: manufacture tears, pretend her mother is dying of a terminal illness, or promise to stop working in the bars if you wire her money every month. Of course, she tells the same story to every other client she manages to get an e-mail address from.

Based on the overt nature of the sex trade in Patong, one might assume that prostitution is legal, but it's been outlawed since the 1960s. But though selling your body, or purchasing someone else's, is technically a crime here, the local police turn a blind eye when the people involved are above the age of consent: That's fifteen years old if you're a “normal” Thai girl and
eighteen if you're a sex worker. Sure, this might seem a little contradictory, but considering the huge amounts of cash the industry rakes in every year (one report puts that number at $4.3 billion a year, 3 percent of the Thai economy), no one's trifling with minor details.

Despite the general seediness of Bangla and its side streets, Jen, Beth, and I didn't feel unsafe there. Other than the occasional lady boy shrieking at us in passing or a Muay Thai boxing tout trying to get us to watch a match, no one paid us a whit of attention. There were far too many pretty faces and too much unchecked flesh for us to warrant more than a passing glance. Still, walking these streets, with their over-the-top carnival atmosphere and false laughter ringing out in stereo sound, made me feel uneasy.

Eventually I asked if we could stop and sit in one of the better-lit beer bars to figure out what to do next. The three of us had been walking around Bangla for only about an hour, but already I'd seen enough. Sitting there sipping her beer, Beth was completely quiet. I realized that this was the first time she'd really witnessed anything like this. Unfortunately, Jen and I had seen it before.

We'd gotten our first crash course in the pervasiveness of prostitution in Diani Beach, Kenya, right after we'd finished our volunteer program at Pathfinder. My friends and I had spent our first night in town at the guidebook-sanctioned Forty Thieves bar, trying to figure out why two local girls at the next table were hanging out with two unattractive balding Germans, one of whom had an obnoxious laugh and a mole the size of a bottle cap.

“Well, they might already know each other,” Holly had said, giving them the benefit of the doubt. “Those women could be their girlfriends.”

“C'mon,” said Irene in a low voice. “No way. They're hookers.”

We'd tried not to stare as the girls stood up and left with the men, only to return an hour later to strike up a conversation with another set of males at the bar. As the night had worn on, we'd witnessed similar transactions taking place all around us. Though the bar didn't rent rooms—drinks, cigarettes, and entrees such as the aptly named Bang-Bang Chicken were the only items on the official menu—Forty Thieves clearly doubled as a brothel.

Scandalized, we'd paid our check, with Irene venting on the matatu ride home about how horrible and disgusting men could be—how dare they exploit these women?

But it wasn't until the next day, when we saw several European women soliciting the services of Diani's ubiquitous “beach boys,” that we were all stunned into silence. On the stretch of pristine sand, blue-haired ladies with flesh bursting out of their skirted bathing suits walked arm in arm with sinewy locals sporting baby dreads and six-pack abs. By the pool, twenty-something blond girls with cornrows and sunburned scalps accepted tanning oil applications from bare-chested Kenyans with bright smiles and a way with words in six different languages. We even ran into the famed octogenarian sex kitten who accepted sexual favors from several different beach boys, then tried to pay them with English toffees instead of cash. Sex sold in Diani Beach—and apparently, both the men
and
the women were buying.

As shocked as I had been by the whole scene, I was more baffled by the idea of arranging a “sexcation.” Why would a foreigner fly to another continent—especially one where HIV had already claimed the lives of millions—for a few ill-gotten and risky orgasms?

Apparently, experts at the United Nations were just as baffled. Rachel, a twenty-five-year-old Kenyan we'd met at dinner one night, confided that she'd volunteered for the United Nations when it had been conducting a study on sex tourism in the
area. Her role had been to infiltrate clubs and bars along the coast and learn the “ins and outs” of the business: What were the average rates for the various services? How did the men and women get started in the industry? In what ways did they try to protect themselves from disease?

Through Rachel's covert ops, she learned that many of the female prostitutes were from very poor villages and had entered the business as an extreme stopgap measure to feed their children after their husbands had left them or had passed away. The money they could make in a few nights as a prostitute would be more than they'd earn in a month back home, if they could even get work. Some men also found it easier to scratch out a living by working the beach, rather than by traveling around to look for jobs as a laborer.

According to Rachel, the sex workers were well aware of HIV and were much more diligent about using condoms than the average Kenyan. They were paid precious little for their services (“The Germans say that for the price of touching a boob back at home they can get the whole body here in Diani”) and conducted their business out in the open rather than in some sleazy back room. But though the women required volume sales to stay afloat, men were often hired for an entire week to give the “relationship” time to develop. Sometimes they wouldn't even be required to have sex, as their clients were often more interested in companionship. They were also generally paid more for their services than their female counterparts. At the time, this disparity seemed unfair, and my compassion went out to the women. I tried to imagine how desperate a Kenyan girl would have to feel in order to compromise her body, to sell it off as her last precious commodity. I'd thought of Naomi and the struggle she'd face to become an educated Kenyan woman rather than a victim of circumstance.

Now, as I clutched a sticky pint glass in Phuket and stared
out at three young girls performing a striptease on a stage in the street, I no longer felt flooded with compassion or empathy. I just felt a clench of sadness, a curdle of disgust. Not toward any of the women, precisely—I figured the ones in Patong probably came from circumstances similar to those in Diani Beach—but in general, at the entire spectacle of it all. Thailand is called “the land of smiles,” but even from here, I felt as though the ones plastered on the faces of the women were false, clownish in their excessiveness.

I also wondered: Was this the place that Carter had come to the week just before meeting me?

It was still well before midnight on the first night of Beth's vacation, but when I suggested leaving, no one put up a fuss. We caught a cab and left the blinky-blinky lights of Patong in the rearview mirror. I slumped down in the polyester seat and reminded myself, as I'd had to do many times during the trip, not to make snap judgments about what I'd seen. It was merely a postcard view of a situation, a one-dimensional reality that I couldn't begin to understand in a single visit.

That was part of the trouble with traveling from place to place so quickly. You hardly had time to get acquainted with the layout of your guesthouse, let alone the tangled inner workings of an entirely different culture, before you had to leave again.

Still, while I was willing to acknowledge my wide-eyed Western naiveté, I was fairly certain of one thing: places like Diani Beach, Patong, and countless others could not exist if the Johns (and the Carters) of the world didn't fuel the demand that kept them alive and thriving.

The following day, Jen, Beth, and I sequestered ourselves within the pristinely tended sanctuary of the Chedi Phuket, planting ourselves on terry-draped deck chairs and ordering drinks that we (or at least Jen and I) couldn't really afford. I knew my friends and I were insulating ourselves from the world
beyond the walls, pretending that the garish, neon-lit, bass-pumping spectacle in Patong existed in some parallel universe, not fifteen miles down the beach. For my part, I was attempting to forget that it had, in some small and scary way, touched my life.

Looking past the onyx-tiled pool, through the precisely spaced white canvas umbrellas to the curve of confectioner's sugar sand, and out at an ocean that graduated from turquoise to cornflower to lapis like ombré silk, I realized that were it not for the musicality of Thai voices in the background, my friends and I could have been anywhere else in the world. And just for a second, that's exactly where I wanted to be.

BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS/CAMBODIA
DECEMBER–JANUARY

I
stood frozen on the sidewalk, mesmerized by how the concrete was studded with ice like diamonds and bordered by fir trees dressed in Christmas lights. On the streets, traffic adhered to perfect order: cars heading in the same direction all stayed in one lane rather than swerving into the opposite to avoid wandering cows or wayward rickshaws.

I hadn't expected to feel such awe earlier that day when I'd swiped my debit card at one of the many ATM machines lining Huntington Avenue. Without a glitch, it spit out a pile of crisp twenty-dollar bills, the familiar image of Andrew Jackson with his bouffant hair falling neatly into my hands. Between Indian rupees, Brazilian reals, Peruvian soles, and Kenyan shillings, I'd started to feel like I was playing with Monopoly money. It was comforting to be back in my homeland with mainstays such as baseball, cranberry sauce, and working traffic lights. And when I'd ducked into a deli that morning to order coffee with a splash of milk, that's exactly what I'd gotten—no need to flip through a pocket language guide first. I'd forgotten how easy life could be.

But I worried that other, more important things wouldn't
slip back on as easily as a pair of well-worn mittens. The crunch of boots over snow on the sidewalk behind me broke into my thoughts and sent me hiding from my pursuer, and I flattened my body inside the doorway of a wine shop. Now I was on the run. I only hoped that I'd moved fast enough to lose the man close on my tail and remain undetected.

Crunch, crunch, crunch
. The footsteps were almost upon me. My entire body shook and I held my breath, trying unsuccessfully to suppress the laughter threatening to explode from my lungs. I pressed my hands against my mouth to hold it in, and woolly fuzzies from my gloves stuck to my peppermint-flavored lip balm.

Crunch, crunch, crunch
. A shadow from the awning overhead fell across my face, and I could see that it was a couple, not the curly-haired man I'd been running from, who passed me by. They were bundled in fluffy scarves and earmuffs, the woman's arm linked through the man's in order to keep her from slipping on the ice.

I stuck out my head, craning my neck to look down the block. In the same instant, Elan's face materialized from behind the shield of another doorway twenty yards down, and his eyes locked on mine. I snapped my head back, but it was too late. The laughter I'd been trying so hard to contain erupted, and I was left gasping for breath and holding my sides. The tears that spilled from my eyes began to form icicles in my lashes.

In the span of a few seconds, Elan sprinted down the block and pounced on my giggling, bent-over form in the doorway. He wrapped his arms around my waist, twirling me on the sidewalk until the lights and the trees and the shoppers and the snowflakes all melted into a wash of color. The couple in front of us stopped to stare, smiling. A few others also turned to see what the commotion was about: Just two people in love, acting like giddy children, playing hide-and-seek in darkened doorways.

As Elan put me down, his arm secured around my waist, I stood on my tiptoes to kiss his cheek; his cold, smooth skin made my lips tingle. I wanted to stay inside that protected snowy world, but sadness clouded my happy moment. Soon I'd be back in the blistering heat, exploring ancient ruins straight out of an Indiana Jones movie, while he'd be meeting with his agent and going on countless auditions. These little moments could be perfect, but the big picture was flawed. The dichotomy of our lives was driving us apart. E-mail and Skype were no substitution for a relationship, and the divide between Elan and me had grown deeper than distance alone.

After graduating from yoga school and spending a few days celebrating with Chloe and Marta on the beaches of Kovalam—indulging in ayurvedic massages and scarfing down any dish made with onions or garlic—I'd flown from Bangalore to spend the holidays in Boston, where Elan had gotten a role in a Chekhov play.

While part of me felt that returning home was cheating on my year abroad, the other part knew I'd be cheating only myself if I didn't make an effort to see Elan again—to lie beside him, breathe him in, and listen to him tell me about his day. And when my parents offered to split the price of a plane ticket between them as my Christmas present, I considered the decision made.

Standing here, wrapped in Elan's arms, I couldn't help but think about the old question “Can you go home again?” Home, I now knew, for me wasn't a place. It was with the people who mattered most.

But if people change, does that mean home is never permanent either?

I'd been pretending that the space between Elan and me didn't exist. I pretended that the evenings spent sipping mulled wine in candlelit cafés and kissing in the streets meant that time
and distance couldn't diminish our love. I tried to believe that falling asleep with my head on his chest to the rhythm of his heartbeat was the way it was always supposed to be.

But while I'd been exploring the world, Elan had turned into a poster child for the term “struggling actor”—eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for breakfast, lunch, and dinner; waiting tables after auditioning all day; pooling loose change from the glass jars on top of our refrigerator to just barely make the rent. So if I sensed a bit of resentment, I figured I'd deserved it. If he couldn't come visit me during my year abroad, well,
I
was the one who'd left.

So many times during my visit, I found myself wondering: Was leaving wrong? Would remaining have been more wrong? I worried that staying in perpetual motion would keep me from finding answers that I was seeking—hadn't I just learned at the ashram that the truth is more likely to reveal itself in stillness?

I couldn't make that decision for my entire future, but I knew what I wanted right now. In the middle of that icy sidewalk, I grabbed Elan's hand, pulling him to a stop midstride. I buried my head in his chest and simply stood still.

 

A
few days, a couple long flights, and a lonely layover in Bangalore later, I finally arrived in Bangkok to be reunited with Jen and Amanda. We'd been apart for more than a month. Deep down, I think they were a little surprised (and relieved) that I hadn't stayed back in the States.

“We were worried you wouldn't want to come back after seeing Elan!” Jen joked when I rejoined them at Big John's hostel.

Glancing at their faces as they poked their heads out of their bunks—faces I now knew as well as my own—I also understood just how dedicated you had to be to travel with two other people for a year of your life. In some ways, this trip required just as
much commitment as my long-term relationship. It meant doing what I said I was going to do. It meant sticking with them even when a place lost its luster, even when we didn't agree, even when we felt like screaming. The second I walked into our tiny, windowless triple and felt relief at seeing their smiles again, I knew that my home, at least for now, was on the road, with Jen and Amanda.

 

A
s usual, the three of us had more time than money to spare, so we boarded a bus rather than a plane to make the five-hour journey from Bangkok to Cambodia. Apparently, taking the cheap route was going to cost us.

“I have an entire page with room for the stamp!” Jen said, stating the obvious to the Cambodian border patrol officer. He returned her passport unmarked after flipping through it and pausing with raised brows at the hodgepodge of stamps. From an outline of Machu Picchu to a rectangle containing the words “Good for Journey to Kenya,” multicolored ink blots tattooed most of her pages—except for the last one. Jen kept her finger planted in the spine of the little blue book, holding it open to the empty page, which just beckoned for a fresh splash of ink.

“No, cannot stamp last page.” The officer adamantly shook his head. The logic of this eluded us: if there was physically room for the Cambodian visa stamp, why couldn't he just use the free space?

Amanda and I stood guard on either side of Jen. Both of us had two blank pages left—the result of more efficient (or overlapping) stamping techniques used by officials at Brazilian customs. “Man, I didn't see anything about blank page quotas in the guidebook,” I said to the girls, fully aware that Jen might not be let into the country at all. And that would mean, of course, that Amanda and I would be going back to Bangkok with her.
Hoping an apologetic approach might work better, I turned to the officer and said, “
Sohm to
[I'm sorry]. What can we do?”

“Must get more passport pages in Thailand,” he said, unwavering. Dust coated our hair and sweat soaked our T-shirts. We'd been prepared to unload our backpacks from underneath the bus and lug them across the border to Poi Pet, one of Cambodia's overland entry towns, but we hadn't accounted for the possibility of enduring the bone-jostling, sports-bra-requiring, multihour trip
back
to Bangkok—if we could even find a bus to take us.

Amanda let her backpack drop to the ground with a thud and then sat on top of it. If we were ever going to get through Cambodian customs, it was obviously going to take a while. “But we're so excited to see your beautiful country,” I tried again. After all, it was true.

“Okay, you pay,” said the officer, crossing his arms over his chest.

Though flattery might get you nowhere, bribery could get you anywhere—in this case, across the Cambodian border. Jen pulled a guidebook from the flimsy fabric purse she'd bartered for in India, opened it to the bookmarked section, “Useful Khmer Phrases,” and said, “
Th'lai pohnmaan
[How much]?”

“Ten dollar.”

“I have only three,” Jen said, slipping a trio of crisp greenbacks printed with George Washington's face from her money belt. Knowing she was bluffing, I wondered if the officer would pull out the handcuffs, attempt to haggle, or simply turn us away.

He peered at the bills for a full minute, then folded them twice before tucking them into the pocket of his button-down shirt. He looked left and right and spoke in a low voice. “Okay, but must get more pages at embassy in Phnom Penh. And must write note for permission to stamp last page.”

He ripped a sheet of lined paper from a tattered notebook and slid it across the desk toward Jen. She grabbed a ballpoint and promptly penned a “Get out of Thailand (Nearly) Free” card:

The officer took the signed permission slip and tossed it into a desk drawer, where it would probably be lost forever, before dismissing us with a wave of his hand.

“Awk koun!
[Thank you!]” we said, all together. Then Jen and I helped Amanda slip on her backpack as automatically as if we were brushing a loose strand of hair from our own eyes. We didn't say a word as we hefted the load onto Amanda's shoulders, grateful that we had safely dodged yet another one of those random travel roadblocks we never saw coming.

With stamped passports in hand and the sun scorching our scalps, we moved deeper into a new land. Giddy that we'd successfully bribed a corrupt border official, I cheered us on as we crossed over the border. I'd come a long way since that morning in Brazil when I'd tried to separate from Jen and Amanda in the party dorms, when I'd worried that the whole trip would turn out to be one big happy hour.

Africa had humbled us, made us appreciate one another more, and strengthened our bonds after sleeping head to toe to escape a cockroach infestation. At no time had the strength of
our friendship been clearer than when walking to a mall next to one of the world's largest slums in Nairobi. We'd stopped our usual chattering abruptly as a deafening
Bang! Bang! Bang!
had shaken the ground beneath our feet.

Before we could figure out if the noise was gunshots, an explosion, or something else, the locals scattered like gazelles being hunted by a lion. Following the herd, the three of us took off running as women held babies close to their chests and men dropped their flip-flops so they could move faster. In the mass panic that ensued, the three of us separated at a fork in the road—Jen sprinting in a zigzag pattern (she said she figured it lessened the odds of being hit by a bullet) to the right and Amanda diving left, crouched low to the ground with her hands shielding her head (she reasoned the lower you are, the safer you are). I'd sprinted ahead to grab Amanda and direct her toward Jen. In that second, choosing right or left wasn't an option—I had to pick both to make sure we were all together and no woman was left behind.

The danger turned out to be imagined. As our six feet slapped the pavement simultaneously, the Kenyans suddenly slowed to a stop and collectively let out a nervous laugh (“Only fireworks,” one young mother said with a weak grin as she removed a blanket from her baby's head). As terrified as I'd been moments earlier, I was relieved to discover that my instinct under fire was to keep the group together.

Now, after more than a month apart, I'd made my way back to the group again and was surer than ever that we were all headed in the same direction. We'd been friends to start, but after good times and bad, our relationships with one another had deepened more than I'd ever expected. Sure, Jen and Amanda might have gotten into a screaming match or two over working on the road, and I'd had to step in to break it up. And maybe I'd escaped from conflicts a time or two by going for a run in
stead of hashing out exactly
why
I couldn't spend one more second listening to Jen and Amanda debate how many fat grams were in a spring roll. By the time we'd (barely) made it over the Cambodian border, any romantic notions we'd harbored about our around-the-world vacation, or about one another, had long since been discarded by the roadside. In their place was a real, perfectly imperfect group of friends.